A Framework to Enhance Email based Business Processes

Despite the consensus that email is an important tool to handle a business process (BP), this prevailing tool poorly supports the tasks it needs to accomplish in a BP. A collection of interrelated business activities which solve a particular issue is commonly known as a BP. The performance of BP is vital for the growth and development of a business. The ineffective performance of BP is a major, yet avoidable, obstacle to the business productivity. Diverse technologies bear weight in enhancing the performance of BP. The technology involved in BP plays a dominant role in BP streamlining. Over the last decade, email has been embraced, not only by the organizations of every shape and form, but also by individuals as a very popular communication technology. The ubiquitous and simple nature of email makes it a suitable candidate to be used as a technology to support BP related communication. However, email poorly supports the task of handling BPes, due to its ad-hoc and heavily distributed nature. In addition, the primary messaging metaphor of most email clients is not optimized for the activities of a BP. But they only address the problem of managing the volume of email. Therefore this paper provides a solution to enhance the use of email for performing BP related activities efficiently and effectively, without changing email's fundamental technical infrastructure. The proposed solution is expected to achieve its objectives by means of a cognitive approach reducing human intervention to the BP.